Dr. Masud Rahman is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science/Software Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan and was advised by Prof. Dr. Chanchal Roy. He completed his Postdoc at the Polytechnique Montreal and was advised by Prof. Dr. Foutse Khomh.

Dr. Rahman leads the RAISE Lab at Dalhousie University. He is interested in the intelligent automation of software maintenance and evolution. Once a software product is released, it enters into the maintenance phase and goes through various major or minor changes. These changes (a.k.a., maintenance activities) can be triggered by several factors including post-release bugs, requests for new features, or even by the need to adapt to new technologies (e.g., Generative AI). Unfortunately, these activities have never been easy despite 40+ years of extensive research! Software maintenance activities claim up to ~50% of the developers' time and cost the global economy billions of dollars every year. For example, in 2017 alone, the global economy lost $1.7+ trillion due to software bugs, crashes, and failures. With the rise of popular but highly complex computing frameworks such as Large Language Models (LLM), Agentic AI, Deep Learning, Cloud Computing, and Mobile Computing, software maintenance has become even more challenging and costlier.

Masud's research program aims to (a) better understand the challenges of software bugs, crashes, vulnerabilities, and technical debt, and (b) design cost-effective, cutting-edge, AI-powered solutions to tackle them effectively. From a technical perspective, Dr. Rahman and his team (a) study the characteristics, symptoms, and root causes of software bugs to advance the current state of understanding and (b) develop novel tools and techniques to automatically detect, diagnose, explain, and reproduce bugs or crashes from not only traditional but also AI-powered and simulation modelling software. In essence, his research opportunistically marries Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Software Engineering (SE) to tackle a challenge plaguing the software industry for decades. Using this unique research program, Masud aims to advance one of Dalhousie’s strategic goals– Advanced AI & Digital Innovation, especially Sustainable Software Innovation and Sustainable AI. His research interests have been significantly shaped by his three years of experience as a professional developer in the software industry. Please check the RAISE Lab to learn more about his research.

To date, Masud has published 50+ research papers, and his works got accepted in several major venues of Software Engineering including ICSE (A*), ESEC/FSE (A*), ASE (A*), TOSEM (A*), EMSE (A), ICSME (A), MSR (A) and SANER (A). Dr. Rahman received multiple prestigious awards such as Governor General's Gold Medal, U of S Doctoral Thesis Award, Best PhD Thesis Award (Computer Science), Dr Keith Geddes Award, Dalhousie Belong Research Fellowship, and the prestigious President Gold Medal (Bangladesh) for his research excellence and outstanding academics. To date, Masud's work received $475K+ (PI) and 4.3M+ (Co-PI, Co-applicant) in competitive research funding from various sources including NSERC Discovery Grant, Mitacs Accelerate International, NSERC Alliance, Climate Action and Awareness Fund, and Dalhousie Startup Fund.